Culturally Responsive Teaching

The role of culturally responsive social and emotional learning in supporting refugee inclusion and belonging: A thematic analysis of service provider perspectives

“…Our findings reflect the critical relevance of such frameworks and demonstrate the particular utility of CRP for the case of social and emotional learning. A framework born of Black educators striving to make schools more supportive for historically excluded, non-white, and especially Black American students [ 30 , 31 ], CRP offers a wealth of resources for promoting inclusion and belonging among students resettled from the MENA region. Although there are parallels and intersections between the experiences of these student populations, especially as refugees of color become racialized over time in the U.S. [ 11 ], there may also be substantial differences in the experiences, needs, and preferences of resettled refugees, which warrant close attention using a culturally responsive framework.…”

“…The framework builds on decades of education scholarship aimed at engaging historically excluded learners in the U.S., especially Black youth, by promoting equitable academic success, positive social identity formation, and an ability to grapple with social inequalities [ 30 ]. CRP proposes a systemwide approach recognizing the strengths of students from all backgrounds, drawing on cultural assets, life experiences, and learning styles to promote more inclusive education [ 31 ] and demanding change of faculty, staff, curricula, policies, and processes for this effort [ 29 ]. Increasingly, educators are calling for practices that not only maintain students’ cultural heritages—as if those were static—but also sustain and respect them through continued engagement, such as through native language instruction [ 32 ].…”

Preparing Educators for Culturally Responsive Teaching Through Technical Cultural Representations

“…An important premise of equity-centered instruction, such as CRT, is the acknowledgement that children have been marginalized based on their culture, language, or identities in school settings. Therefore, CRT involves acknowledging the legitimacy of different ethnic groups to incorporate diverse content delivery, cultivating bridges between home and school experiences, using a wide variety of instructional strategies, incorporating appreciation of students own and others' heritages, and bringing multicultural resources across the curriculum (Gay, 2000).…”

“…An important first step is to recognize how pedagogies are aligned with linguistic, literate, and cultural hegemony, and that white middle class students should not be the norm for how everyone should learn and communicate (Paris & Alim, 2014). The classroom research of Ladson-Billings (1995) and Gay (2000) has been foundational to how we view CRT and has provided frameworks for expansive thinking and the potential for inclusive learning (Smith, 2020).…”

“…International context factors into the design of our program, providing educators with an opportunity to immerse themselves in another culture from a minority perspective, learning what it feels like to speak a different language or to hold alternative views relative to cultural themes they choose to study. To model CRT and provide training that builds on tenets of CRT (Gay, 2000) and cultural competence (Deardorff, 2006), educators in our program select a cultural theme to digitally represent with encouragement to choose themes that elevate understanding of social justice issues. For example, the third author of this paper participated in our program and chose to represent issues of inequity for the immigrant Roma people when visiting Czechia.…”